BSDi

Berkeley Software Design, Inc.

Shortly before the release of 4.4BSD, a number of Computer Systems Research Group programmers saw which way the wind was blowing and jumped ship in order to found Berkely Software Design, Inc. Working with Bill Jolitz, their flagship product was to be BSD/386, a commercialized port of BSD to the i386. At this point, it gets very, very messy. AT&T subsidiary USL, BSDi, and otherparties became entangled in lawsuits involving the Unix source.

At around the same time, Bill Jolitz discovered that BSDi planned to have a viable business model by not releasing BSD/386 under the BSD license. In the fallout of the lawsuit, he left the company, destroyed his work on BSD/386 and began work on making BSD Net/2 into a usable i386 OS called (confusingly) 386BSD, independently of CSRG and BSDi.

In 1994, the suit was finally settled with Novell, the new owner of USL. As a condition of the suit, BSDI agreed to stop distributing BSD/386. Instead, they ported and enhanced 4.4BSD-Lite and sold it as BSD/OS.

More recently, BSDi and their product, BSD/OS, have become so linked in the mind of the public that one is often confused for the other.